(88f) Characterization and Processing of Khulays Clay for Drilling Fluid Application

Drilling fluid plays a very crucial role in the successful completion of oil well drilling operations. Usually, the cost of drilling fluid is one of the major elements that determine the overall cost of oil production. For this reason, research effort in drilling fluid has been directed towards developing cheap materials in order to reduce the cost of drilling. This work is focused on developing a procedure for processing and purification of locally sourced raw materials from Khulays for application in drilling operation. A systematic laboratory scale purification process was performed in order to identify the optimized processing parameters that are needed to perform a scale up and commercial production of the clay. Attempt was made to correlate the processing parameters with the drilling fluid performance properties. Preliminary results obtained during the processing revealed that the recovery efficiency can be improved by increasing the number of recovery cycles and number of stages. However, there exists an optimum for each of these parameters.